Hi John,
It was a disappointing quarter for all of the investment platform companies and Netwealth (NWL) was the hardest hit.
While they are still seeing FUA growth, the $2.1b of net inflows fell short of expectations of ~$3b. the miss driven by low investor sentiment weighing on retail inflows. Overall, Netwealth is a great business, but like it’s peers, they need scale to justify the ~39x price to expected earnings. Hub24 (HUB) trades on ~35x while the smallest of the bunch, Praemium (PPS) trades on nearly 14x, a discount we don’t believe is justified.
We own Praemium in the Emerging Companies Portfolio and prefer Hub24 to Netwealth, though we would consider either into a pullback.